Workshop: Is Co-authorship a Luxury in a Time of Fascism: Making films on nothing to navigate the economies of leisure, pleasure and urgency in sex work, political organizing and collaborative filmmaking
What is the difference between using the arts in organizing and political art? This workshop muses on dilemmas of working with exploited, politically activated communities in crisis. How do we take the act of filmmaking collaboratively seriously if participants are genuinely so in crisis, their time and labor is at a breaking point—they can’t afford to spend the time to truly co-author a film? What does filmmaking really entail and how do we break it into its fundamental pieces, to make it as agile, scrappy, negotiable and modular, without resorting to “stunt” co-credits or misrepresenting labor and power relations in filmmaking and organizing. By borrowing from a recent project with erotic laborers, massage workers and migrant workers in active organizing and resistance, artist and scholar Diana Mulan Zhu will draw on dialectical behavioral therapy, software engineering, fluxus, and crip practices to guide a workshop on making films on smartphones in her “docufiction” approach, covering costume, set design, cinematography, lighting, editing, performance, graphics and sound.
Experience Level
Introductory - Intermediate
Prerequisites
This workshop is ideal for someone who has shot and edited moving image, film, video, media before but also open to those with no experience.
Suggested Equipment / Materials
Smartphone with storage space available of 3-5 GB, able to shoot in 4K; headphones for smartphone, notebook, download apps: Blackmagic Camera, CapCut (make accounts). Optional: tripod for smartphone.
About the Instructor
Diana Mulan Zhu is a second-generation Chinese-American artist, filmmaker, technologist, and scholar whose work traces inherited trauma, cultural alienation, and the hypersexualized representation of Asian women across painting, video, performance, and installation. Using generative AI as both tool and critique, she interrogates techno-orientalism and the surveilled digital image. She holds an MFA from Stony Brook University and is a PhD student and Cota Robles Fellow in Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, and a DISCO / Future Histories Studio fellow. She has exhibited internationally, from Anthology Film Archives (New York) to Prisma Estudio (Lisbon).